You Wouldn’t Like Paul Scheer When He’s Angry—He Didn’t Either

Paul Scheer is primarily known for making people laugh, having spent more than two decades as a podcaster and comic actor on shows such as 30 Rock, Veep, The League, and the police procedural satire NTSF: SD: SUV. But in his new memoir, Joyful Recollections of Trauma, Scheer delves into the not-so-funny forces that shaped his sense of humor and outlook on life. In this excerpt, from a chapter entitled “Hulk,” Scheer recounts a series of childhood clashes with his mother’s boyfriend, and how he learned to resist the angry impulses that consumed some of the adults raising him.

As a kid, I loved watching The Incredible Hulk, the cheesy live-action ’80s show in which the Hulk was played by two different people. David Banner—yes, they changed his name from Bruce to David—was played by Bill Bixby, a normal, nice guy. The Hulk was played by weightlifting champion Lou Ferrigno, covered in green paint and wearing a bad black wig. I loved the show except for the moments when David Banner would turn into the Hulk. The camera would zoom in on his eyes, and I watched in absolute terror as his pupils would shrink and then expand, changing into fiery cat’s eyes. His anger was coming to a full boil, and you could see it all in those eyes. This transformation was one of the most horrific images my five-year-old brain had ever absorbed. I was watching someone literally explode from within. The first time I saw it, I ran out of the room crying. The image haunted me at night. My mom tried to get me over my fear by painting me green like the Hulk, but it wasn’t the Hulk I was afraid of. I loved the Hulk. I was afraid of the split second when he turned—when man became monster.

I don’t remember when the abuse started with Hunter. When I look back on that time, I just recall a chorus of raised voices, hurled insults, broken tchotchkes, and aggressive behavior. As I mentioned earlier, all the chaos and abuse were so normalized that only in the retelling do I realize just how abnormal they were. Those moments where I was so scared and thought I might die hit harder now because at the time I was just thrilled to survive. I felt victorious for outsmarting Hunter and narrowly avoiding a worse beating, like the time I outran a pitchfork he threw at my back. I didn’t think about what would’ve happened if I’d run just a bit more slowly and he’d actually gotten me. Instead, those moments, though dark, feel triumphant to this day. They are the mental medals I won in the war I fought in my own house.

Most of the attacks happened without anyone else around, but sometimes other people were subjected to scenes of him punishing me. During a second-grade birthday party where I was “misbehaving,” Hunter took a chair, placed it in the middle of the room, and spanked me in front of all of my friends. It wasn’t with his hands; it was with a belt. As I lay across his legs, I saw sympathetic and confused looks on my friends’ faces, and I tried so hard not to cry, to be relaxed as if this were an everyday occurrence. Truthfully, it was. The only difference was the presence of spectators. When he was done, I mustered all the energy I could to get back into the party, still shaking a bit but trying to convince everyone I was “fine,” when I clearly wasn’t.

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As I got older, I realized more and more just how alone Mom and I were during that time. It wasn’t that we wanted to stay; it was that we didn’t have any help to get out. Over the years, we asked so many people to intervene. They were either scared to interfere or, as one relative put it, “we didn’t want to intrude on your family business.”

We tried to convince Hunter to go to family counseling for a long time, and when we finally succeeded, the therapist asked me to detail every violent physical interaction I’d had with him. Hunter wasn’t allowed to interrupt; he just had to listen. As I told her every story of abuse I could remember, from washing my hands with scalding water until my fingers lost sensation to him routinely slapping my face and giving me wedgies that made my eyes tear, the therapist’s shock was apparent. She eventually had to cut me off because the list was so long and she had more than enough to prove her point. She challenged Hunter: “Let’s make an agreement: if you ever lay a hand on your stepson or wife again, I’m going to call the police.” I believed her. Finally, we had someone who would hold him accountable.

He did hit me again. We all went back to the counselor. I told her exactly what had happened, and she took a long breath and said, “Okay, Hunter, this is your last chance. If it happens one more time, I’ll call the police.” She let him off the hook! She treated him like she had caught a kid stealing an Oreo from the pantry. I had never felt more helpless. I knew she was never going to call the police, and I knew we were never going to family counseling again, because Hunter had gotten lucky, and he wasn’t going to double down on his good luck. We left that office and never returned, and the therapist never followed up with us.

I once made an anonymous call to Child Protective Services that brought a police officer and counselor to our house. They interviewed Mom and Hunter together in the same room. It was like interviewing a kidnapper and kidnappee together: you aren’t going to get the true story. My mom was too scared to say anything. Plus the counselor never spoke to me. Suffice it to say, CPS didn’t find anything wrong—once again reinforcing the idea that if you live through it and have no scars, you’re fine and why complain. I often thought, Maybe one time he will break my arm or leg, then I can finally get some real help. But he never did. That was the trickiest thing about his violence: it didn’t leave any physically permanent marks.

But the most shocking thing was how neutral the rest of our family was toward all of the violence. My very Italian great-grandmother, who lived with us for a short time in her nineties, quickly became privy to what was happening at our house. I told her that Hunter hit me and my mom, and she said, “It’s not abuse if nothing is broken.” She’d lived through multiple wars and immigrated through Ellis Island—I often heard stories where she broke wooden spoons over her own children’s heads when they misbehaved—so her empathy meter was probably a touch off. Once Hunter and I got into a physical fight where he threw a plant at my head, all while my great-grandmother sat there watching TV, unmoved. Her only interjection was, “Boys! Boys! Keep it down! People’s Court is on.”

Unlike my great-grandmother, my grandma (my mom’s mom) was my closest ally. I spent a lot of my youth with her while my parents worked. She was one of the only people I could fully confide in. She didn’t like Hunter from the beginning; she’d joke and make fun of him to me privately and always made it a point to take him down a peg or two to his face in front of me. She was the only adult I ever saw do that. When she was over, we’d stand together. She always had my back—until she didn’t. After a particularly bad Christmas dinner, a verbal fight started between my grandma and Hunter, and it slowly erupted until every adult was screaming. Finally, my grandma got up and announced to us, “It’s either him or me!” If Hunter kept treating her grandson and daughter this way, she wouldn’t come back ever again. The logic here is hard to parse: the punishment for his abuse was eliminating interactions with his mother-in-law . . . whom he didn’t like? It made no sense and still doesn’t, even though she stands by her decision to this day: “I had to do what I had to do”—which was nothing. She gathered up her coat and left, my grandfather trailing behind. We didn’t see her again for what seemed like years.

My dad’s response to Hunter was the toughest to come to terms with. Dad was very present in my life. The Herculean efforts he made to juggle work and fulfill his duties as a parent continue to astound me. He was my rock; though my parents were divorced and he lived and worked over an hour away, he never missed any of my big events. Not only did I spend every weekend with him, but he also came to our house after school twice a week just to be with me.

Hunter was jealous of my dad’s relationship with me simply because my dad was my dad, and Hunter couldn’t compete. In his warped brain, Dad was his greatest rival, and Hunter needed to take him down. He saw the joy I had in my eyes when Dad was around, a joy Hunter couldn’t take away or duplicate. So in typical fashion if he couldn’t earn it, he forced it—whether it was making me call him Dad, insisting on me giving him kisses, or talking shit about my dad and sharing things that my mom told him privately about her and my dad’s relationship. It didn’t work. I loved my dad and nothing was going to change that.

When I’d talk to my dad about Hunter and how he treated me, my dad would listen but never emotionally engage. I was so frustrated by his rational responses. I wanted him to be my defender. Unlike my grandma, he never expressed anger that this was happening to me, that I was subjected to this violence. He never made a move to change anything. I honestly don’t think I’ve ever heard my dad talk badly about Hunter, even to this day. When it came to Hunter, my dad was always polite; their interactions resembled those of a worker and a building security guard who see each other every day, simple hellos and empty small talk. But this veneer of courtesy was eventually bound to break.

One Sunday afternoon, after a day of apple picking, my dad and I came home to see Hunter at the kitchen table in a bathrobe, drinking a cup of coffee. Dad and I entered like we’d done hundreds of times before and started chatting about our apple-picking adventure. Hunter sat motionless and then growled, “You come into my house and you don’t fucking say hello to me?”

“It’s your fucking problem if you didn’t hear me say hello!” my dad responded almost instantaneously, as if he had been waiting for this moment for years. I’d never heard him curse before, let alone get confrontational.

Hunter was shocked that my dad spoke back to him and went into beast mode. He took his full coffee mug and threw it at Dad’s head. Dad ducked as it exploded against the living room wall. Hunter then jumped up to his feet and charged at him. Given the violence I’d experienced at Hunter’s hands, I was scared for my dad. I jumped in between them and was pushed to the ground as they grappled and clawed through the dining room and down our hallway. I scrambled to my feet, took some apples out of the bag, and fired them into the melee, hitting them both and making things worse.

The fight continued to our front door where Hunter slapped at my dad’s face, knocking off his glasses, and pushed him out the door. As I lunged to follow, Hunter slammed the door shut, locking me inside while my dad was outside. In tears I sank to the floor and clutched Dad’s broken glasses in my hand. Hunter pushed past me without a word, like a boxer after a match. I swung at his legs with my fists as he retreated to his bedroom and slammed the door behind him.

The fight was Hunter’s ultimate attempt to take power away from Dad. Maybe Hunter thought that if I saw that he was the stronger one, I’d like him more. I was beside myself, but my mother had an idea to make it better for me and to keep the peace: a truce. She mediated an apology over the phone between these two men while I listened in and got to tell them how much they upset me as well. But I’ll never forget that as part of this truce my dad had to apologize for not properly greeting Hunter, and now as a result of that action, Dad would have to ask permission before he could enter the house every time he visited. In that moment my dad lived through a version of what my days with Hunter were like. Clearly, now things were going to change, be different. But no, things just went back to normal, like hanging that broken picture back on the wall. We never talked about it again.

Having no protection from the adults in my life started to awaken another person inside of me: someone who was stronger, who fought back, who had an antidote to Hunter’s villainy.

I remember the day when I transformed. In addition to the acts of rage and anger, a lot of the abuse happened under the guise of playfulness. Hunter would lure me into a trap of just having fun, only to use my naivete to show me that he couldn’t be beat. I often fell for the trap of “wrestling.” He always wanted to wrestle, and I always took the opportunity because it felt like a chance to fight back without getting in trouble. But he was over forty years old, and I was ten. He dominated me. He wouldn’t stop until I screamed or begged for mercy.

Then one day I was done begging. He had my arm twisted so badly it felt like it was about to snap, but I endured the pain. He kept repeating, “Say mercy!” and I wouldn’t. I didn’t want to be beaten anymore. As he sat on top of me, intensifying the pain, I saw a golden opportunity to overtake him. The way he was hovering over me, I had enough room to knee him in the crotch. It didn’t feel fair, but I was over being fair. I kneed him twice in the groin, and he screamed in pain, a sound I’d never heard from him before. It felt good. He released his grip on me, and I rolled out from under him. I’d won! And I’d done it by being angry, fighting dirty. I could never beat him through strength alone; this was the only way. If I wanted a fighting chance, I had to be more aggressive, louder, dirtier. It was this moment that unleashed my inner Hulk—and gave me hope. My Hulk was my protector, the person I desperately needed but didn’t have in my life.

But of course this change also had negative consequences. We began to fight harder. Soon every match was a no-holds-barred event. He’d choke me, covering my nose and mouth completely, and wait for me to almost pass out and then drop me on the floor and walk away. I got more and more aggressive, too; I used my fists and my words, whether it was making up songs on my Casio keyboard about his dead mother being a whore or starting a wrestling match where my only goal was to pull on his hair plugs. What I lacked in strength and size, I made up for in constant irritation, trying to hit him only where it hurt.

Another side effect was all this aggression started to bleed out into other areas of my life. If I was involved in a schoolyard fight, I’d take it nuclear. I fought like a person possessed. But no matter how much damage I did, the teachers assumed that I must have been provoked, because I wasn’t “that kid.”

I looked for fights, ways to work out this aggression. I saw myself as a vigilante chasing bullies. If I felt like someone was being disrespectful to me or a friend, my Hulk came out, and I challenged them like they were Hunter. Since they were seventh graders and I was used to fighting a forty-year-old man, I did more damage than was necessary. It’s not something I’m proud to look back on now, because my fights were often incredibly violent. Then, as fast as the Hulk emerged, I’d go right back to being my calm self. The transitions between Bruce and Hulk were truly instantaneous.

Long after we left Hunter, my anger stayed with me. It reached its peak in high school when I sent a kid to the hospital. He had to get stitches after I wouldn’t stop driving his face into a nearby car fender during our fight in the parking lot. I saw the look on the other kids’ faces as they watched me pummel my classmate. It was the same look on my friends’ faces at my birthday party when they saw Hunter whip me with a belt. I knew in that moment I’d gone too far. I saw the damage I was doing. I’d become Hunter. I was the aggressor. Years after Hunter was out of my life, this anger remained. Being bullied always brought it right back to the surface. I’d been lying to myself, saying that these kids deserved it. They didn’t. I thought I had control over my rage. I didn’t. Once it was unleashed, it took over, and my fuse was so short that I was actually dangerous.

I didn’t want people to see me this way. I was embarrassed by who I was and what I did. I was out of control; I felt like a wild animal. I didn’t have anyone to talk to, to help me work out what my anger and aggression were stemming from and how I might change. I knew deep down I had to walk away from reacting with violence, and I did.

My senior year of high school, a kid showed up to my house to fight me after I had been a total ass and prank called his mother about him being arrested. As we walked to the backyard to “fight,” I had an out-of-body experience. I wasn’t turning into the Hulk; I was the Hulk. I didn’t want people showing up at my house just to fight me. I didn’t want to be like Hunter who would come home in an arm splint or with a black eye because he said the wrong thing to someone in the truck depot. In that moment, I knew I needed to change.

Before a fight, I was used to feeling like a wild animal, but now my posture became that of prey. My voice cracked as I said, “I don’t want to fight you.” I felt tears welling up, as I finally admitted to myself that this wasn’t me. I was a mess; in this moment I was reconciling with all my past aggressive behavior and was proud and scared about making a choice to break this pattern.

Then I did something I very rarely did: I apologized. “Hey, man, I’m really sorry. I fucked up. I didn’t mean to freak out your mom.” It was hard; in my household, there wasn’t much apologizing going on. Apologizing meant you were wrong. If someone else was responsible for your behavior, then you never had to be accountable for anything. Occasionally, you might apologize for how heated you got but never for getting upset in the first place. But in this moment, the other kid’s defensive posture dropped, and we were just two kids standing in my backyard. He gave some sort of warning, like “I’ll let you off this time,” as he walked away. But I couldn’t even hear him because my heart was racing so fast that the sound of my pulse clogged my ears and I was in a bit of a daze. Was this actually happening? Did I walk away from a fight? Was I finally leaving this part of me behind?

After that day, I did a 180 and went in a completely different direction. I made it a point to avoid all fights and arguments. If someone else got angry, I took the blame. I was passive and rational. I was mirroring that part of my dad that frustrated me so much, but in doing so I wasn’t getting better—I was just putting off actually dealing with any emotions. I still had this explosive berserker energy under the surface, but I knew how to keep it locked up. Occasionally, it would manifest suddenly, like on the subway with a pushy passenger or with a landlord I once attacked with a small potted plant (thankfully, I missed).

Before my long-term postcollege girlfriend broke up with me, she wanted us to go to couples therapy, which I happily did because I would agree to anything and, honestly, that was part of our problem. The relationship ended, but I stayed in therapy, finally working through the rage issues that I’d spent years avoiding. I realized I went from full-time Hulk to just Bruce Banner. There was no balance, just extremes. As I started to allow myself to examine these feelings, I found a new voice, less passive, more opinionated, someone who was okay with anger as a part of the spectrum of emotions I could access.

Years later when I was with June and we were talking about children, I felt scared. I’d always wanted to have kids, but I also knew that being a parent would be the truest test of who I was. I was afraid that the stress of parenting would upset the delicate balance I had found and that I’d worked so hard to achieve.

What if my anger came back? I had met June post-therapy, and she might have seen tiny moments of this in our time together, but she didn’t really know that side of me. So bringing her into this fear was the final step of owning who I was, for better or worse. But she wasn’t scared. She was there for me. When I think I’m in my darkest moment, knowing I have a partner I can express this to makes everything less scary, and she can relate to my darkness. With the knowledge that I was more aware and emotionally evolved than Hunter and with the right support behind me, we decided to have a baby.

When I met our son, I was instantly overcome with love for this precious being. My desire to protect kicked in again; only this time, I knew that part of protecting June and my son was not doing anything stupid that would scar them or put myself or them in danger. I still experience anger and even moments of rage, but I’m not afraid of that side of myself anymore. My anger might get the better of me sometimes, but it will never get the best of me.